Legalism is for many people one of the more difficult aspects of religion. We cannot help feeling, with some unease, how close it comes to the spirit of the scribes and Pharisees, the very antithesis of New Testament religion, the service of the heart, the freedom of the sons of God. As a subject of prayer, then, it will be even more difficult to assimilate. An ‘Ode to the Codex Juris Canonici’ would surely be limited in its appeal, and as a hymn would not be an obvious success. Yet it is precisely this sort of prayer which the psalter presents to us in psalm I, for example, or 118, or the second half of psalm 18.

The acrostic form used by many of these psalms does not lessen our difficulty. Psalm 118 is in fact a tour de force in this style: it is composed of twenty-two stanzas of eight lines each, in which each line begins with the same letter of the alphabet so that the twenty-two stanzas go through the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Such a form, one might well think, does not make for great poetry; it is a rigid straight-jacket strangling any lyrical impulse or indeed any proper development of thought. And we may be tempted to think that this form is the reflection of the subject matter—uninspired, formalised, the apotheosis of the legal spirit.